Evernote is my Brain Upgrade

If you’re not using Evernote or something like it, you need to start. Lifehackers can tell you about how it can make you more productive than Iron Man but I want to stress the most profound benefit: not having to remember minutiae. Evernote is my brain upgrade. Like most people, I can’t hold onto more than about 7 things in short term memory. Sucks, but our hardware just isn’t optimized for that. We’re good at hand eye coordination and humor among other things but trying to remember phone numbers and shopping lists just makes us wonder if we really are doomed for idiocracy.

Not having to stress about the small stuff makes me more relaxed. I’m at peace instead of trying to remember that guy’s last name I met at the conference–luckily, I took a photo of his business card and Evernote allows me to search for his first name because it automatically parsed the text from the photo. Sexy. With my stylus and tablet, I hand-write notes in Penultimate, which is now part of Evernote. Oh, handwriting is also automatically parsed and indexed.

Evernote isn’t just an app, it’s an extension of my brain on my phone, my laptop, my tablet–eventually everywhere. It’s synced in the cloud and they’ve built or bought many different ways to get your brain connected to the digital world. It’s an impressive mission and a core tool in today’s ADHD world. So if you’re wondering how other people seem to get more done with less stress and in less time, it’s because we cheat. We upgraded our brains with free(mium) tools like this to let our brains chew on the important stuff or Candy Crush.